


The Dead Don't Dream

by EmmyJay



Category: The Dark Crystal (1982), The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Dreams, F/M, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Parenthood, skekTif - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26238790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmyJay/pseuds/EmmyJay
Summary: A curtain where it shouldn't be.  A family that never was.  A moment that should have been let go.
Relationships: skekMal/skekSa (Dark Crystal)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	The Dead Don't Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SaraWolffuchs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaraWolffuchs/gifts).



> skekTif created by and belonging to [SaraWolffuchs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaraWolffuchs).

The curtain was familiar, but wrong.

Physically, it looked and felt the same as it ever had, the dozens or scores or hundreds of times skekMal had pushed past it. But it was never meant to be _here_ , strung between the trees of the Endless Forest like some Podling's laundry hung out to dry.

It was only the curiosity of its inexplicable presence that drew skekMal toward it. He brushed it aside to reveal what should have been more trees, more underbrush, but which he somehow knew would not be anything of the sort. The fabric fluttered closed behind him, the forest from which he had come ceasing to exist as he stepped into the Captain's cabin, a space as familiar as the trees and the curtain; as familiar as the figure lounging by the fire, and the smaller one cradled in her hands.

"Ah," he said, the world righting itself in clarity, "I'm dreaming."

It was a rarity for Skeksis to dream, enough that skekMal could count his own over a thousand trine on his fingers, but not unheard of. Across the room, skekSa laughed.

"You sound so certain," she quipped, her rough voice thick with amusement. "Perhaps this isn't your dream at all; perhaps it's mine."

"Impossible," skekMal countered, "the dead don't dream."

"And how would you know that? Are you dead, Hunter?"

In skekSa's grasp skekTif began to fuss, disturbed by the voices talking above her. skekSa made to tend to her, but skekMal got there first: crossing the cabin in a few quick strides and dropping to the little one's level. He stroked a claw through the downy plumage at her ruff, scratching gently below her chin until she crooned, and settled back into slumber.

"Maybe I am," he pondered aloud—a trait not his own, this habit of pondering, and yet one the Fishcake seemed to bring out in him time and time again. "Maybe this spawn of yours slit my throat while I slept, and that's how we're speaking now."

skekSa huffed out a laugh, and bent her head to nip at his crown. "I believe that would make her more your spawn than mine."

skekMal's primary hands were occupied with soothing skekTif, but his secondary pair caught the sides of skekSa's face as she preened him, stroking the lines and furrows there. He pushed up into her, rubbing his beak against the underside of her jaw, and from memory he recalled the smell of her: like salt and sea air, a world away from the thick musk of the forest.

"Why did you keep her from me?" he asked. "Why did you never send word?"

A deep sigh left skekSa, heavy in its sorrow as it ruffled the sparse hairs at his nape. "If I am truly your dream, Hunter, then you know I can give you no answers beyond your own thoughts."

They sat in quiet for some time, then: the three of them, a family that never was, a moment that should have been let go many trine past. Seeing skekTif cradled in skekSa's hands made only more obvious the resemblance between the two. It was a resemblance skekMal had noted while awake as well, seen in the tilt of the Fishcake's head, or the gesturing of her hands, or the way she became increasingly onerous when hungry—each observation a pinprick of pain he denied ever feeling, the sort of sentimental trash a Gelfling would whinge about.

"Do you remember the last time we sailed together?" he broke the silence—a pointless thing, to ask questions of a dream. "You met me on the Sifan Coast. We found a cave, one no Gelfling ships could access." The entrance had been fully submerged even at low tide, hiding it entirely. But such a thing had been no issue for Vassa, and they had broken the water's surface inside to find a world of sparkling crystal, the only light the luminescent stones jutting from its rough walls.

Had she already been carrying skekTif, then? Or had the little thing been made in that cave, as the stones glittered like starlight around them?

"We should never have left that place," he murmured, closing his eyes. "We should have stayed in that cave forever, and let the world rot outside without us."

It would never have worked, skekMal knew—skekSa would never ( _could_ never) have given up the sea, any more than he could give up the hunt. But what was a dream if not a wish for the impossible, to be forgotten at First Brother's light?

"I wish we had stayed there."

skekSa said nothing in reply. And when skekMal opened his eyes, he was back in the bough of a tree, the scent of salt air already forgotten.


End file.
